What we’re doing 2017 to 2019

Seen together, our activities are tools — artistic, discursive, logistical, and financial – for artists from the Arab world to use toward inventing new arts practices, arts organizations, and art publics.

The CONSORTIUM COMMISSIONS is a program of producing and presenting ambitious new art projects by emerging contemporary artists, in partnership with museums, art centers, theatres, and festivals. Each invited artist receives a production grant and presents their new work with two of the partners. For the first round, Mophradat has partnered with The Hammer Museum at UCLA in Los Angeles, Kunstencentrum BUDA in Kortrijk, Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Next Festival Eurometropolis, MDT theater in Stockholm, Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto, and more. The artists are selected through a nomination process from within the partner network, and the first commissioned artists will be announced in December. More here.

The ART FELLOWS program is an eight-week full-time or twelve-week part-time training program at European art institutions for young Arab curators, arts managers, arts producers, and arts administrators living in the partners’ cities. It is intended to help them develop knowledge, skills, and professional networks. The partner organizations hosting Art Fellows in 2018 are Beursschouwburg in Brussels, Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid, CCA: Center for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow, WIELS | Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels, and Münchner Kammerspiele in Munich. Open calls will be announced through the institutions shortly. More here.

Our ART TIME RESIDENCIES see us partnering with several international organizations to provide residency opportunitiesfor artists and writers to immerse themselves in different contexts. During the residencies they are able to focus exclusively on their practice, visit international exhibitions, performances and institutions, and meet a new art community. Our current partners are CCA:Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow and WIELS | Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels. You can find out more here.

We are also initiating ORBITALS,an annual program where three or four curators are selected through an open call to travel together to an international location determined by Mophradat for research and exchange. During the nine-day guided trip, the participants willmeet and share their experience with peers in the art scenes they are visiting. The first trip is to Mexico in May 2018, and the related open call will be announced in December this year.

ACCOMPLICES is the new name of our annualevent previously known as theInformal Meeting. Twenty artists, writers, and curators meet in a remote location to discuss questions about the present and future of their field and practices.The nextAccomplices takes place in early 2018 with a focus on artists dealing with the experience of geographic distance from peers and audiences.

Our GRANTS FOR ARTISTS and PARTICIPATION GRANTS programs continue as usual. Grants for Artists is aimed at individuals, collaborations, or collectives seeking support for research or production. Participation Grants are for those invited to take part in a conference, exhibition, symposium, biennial, festival, or any other such non-commercial artistic activity, who need support for their travel. For both grants, institutions can also apply on behalf of the artists and open-ended activities can also be supported. More here and here.

And please keep an eye out for news of our occasional PUBLISHING and of the EVENTS we organize in Europe and the Arab world.

Mophradat’s homepage hosts an editorial project that publishes new and existing texts related to contemporary art practices and the languages used to discuss them. Over the coming months, the art collective Nile Sunset Annex (NSA) has been commissioned to be our editorial voice. NSA selects an art-related word each month that has a twist when translated between Arabic and English, and are finding, creating, or commissioning a text in both languages that relates to the selected word. NSA’s process is intended as self-educational and the glossary, rather than being prescriptive, will question the terms and their uses in both languages. As NSA describes, “the conversations that arise in attempts to find common ground or agree on the significance or etymology of certain words can be a space of potential.” NSA is working on this glossary with translator Ziad Chakaroun.

Nile Sunset Annex (NSA) primarily functions as an art space that puts on monthly exhibitions of artists’ work in a spare room in an apartment in Garden City, Cairo, but it also acts as a publishing house, a contemporary art collection, an archivist, an artist, an author, a bartender, a curator, and an installation team. Founded in January 2013, NSA is still evolving.

Untitled: upturnedhouse was initially shown in New York, where it was installed in a very ad hoc way. This process had to be radically changed when it was agreed that it would be shown in the Carnegie. All its failings exploded into reality. The challenge was to retain its haphazard character, but to construct it as a permanent object. It was as if my love of the conflicting nature of making and un-making were being meticulously scrutinized as a badly told lie — I felt like a criminal whose devious activities were on trial. It was all for good, though; I have been giving my ways of making and un-making a tougher, mental acknowledgement. My works are now being shown more than once — something I do not have much experience with, since in the past my works have been shown and then destroyed, with some materials being salvaged for future use. Making more permanent works has made me more resilient and purposeful about my building and re-building methods. It can be gruelling, and yes, the resulting works are hard won, not necessarily always in a good way. I’m still hanging onto an uneasy relationship with whether the works are ever finished or not, because it generates excitement and uncertainty. I never know if more should be added or removed. I don’t doubt what I am doing, but I want the freedom to change my mind and to be able to undo today’s job tomorrow, regardless of whether it turns out well or badly. I want a fluid thinking process to be realized in the material reality of the work itself, to try and narrow the gap between thought and action.

Phyllida Barlow, in conversation with Vincent Fecteau in Bomb Magazine.